The $1.84 Billion Deal

The 1.84 Billion Deal

In 2001 the state of California had a budget surplus of $34 billion. California had the fifth largest economy in the world, ranking ahead of France and behind England. California public schools did not reflect this wealth. California had nearly six million K-12 students, nearly 40% lived below the poverty line and 20% were not proficient in English. The state despite its wealth ranked 37th in class size and 40th in per pupil funding. The quality of California public schools had declined markedly from the 1960’s when they were considered among the best in the nation. The decline had begun with the governorship of Ronald Reagan. Reagan was an advocate of Milton Friedman’s neoliberal theory of economics. He began a program of cutting taxes and cutting every public service program he could find. Schools had been one of the Reagan’s main targets and he did a great job. By 2000 our schools were in bad shape.
With the $34 billion surplus the California Teachers Association and our 330,000 members felt it was time for the state to give our schools a funding increase.

In October of 2000, as President of the California Teachers Association, I proposed a two billion dollar addition to the state education budget. The media picked up the story and it was reported in the LA Times, SF Chronicle, and just about every radio and TV station in California. I did many interviews on the subject from San Diego to Redding. Many of the interviewers were hostile but this only fired the debate. I spoke of our proposal at several speaking engagements and our teacher leaders around the state were advocating it to their teachers and local media. California Governor Gray Davis had proposed a 500 million dollar increase in funding in his budget proposal. CTA’s counter proposal of $2 Billion set off a prolonged public debate. Negotiations between CTA, the legislature, and the governor began almost immediately. Most of the negotiations took place in the media. CTA’s governmental relations staff in Sacramento negotiated with the legislators for support of the two billion dollar proposal. The governor began to understand that the public understood that the schools were under funded and most agreed with the proposal to give extra money to the schools.

Mr. Davis was an interesting man (when it came to raising money)…. He appeared to enjoy squeezing his friends and supporters and give them as little as he could and still retain their support. I’m sure he thought that two billion dollars was an outrageous figure. He kept raising his offer through the fall and spring from 500 million up to about 700 million. Preliminary numbers showed that California tax revenues were going to be substantial. That good news in January of 2001 made us realize that a large addition for education was possible. Carolyn Doggett, CTA’s Executive Director, and a strong and talented CTA staff began to organize a rally at the state capitol in May of 2001. We did not fully realize that the idea of a large addition to the state education budget had really struck a cord with our members. The CTA staff began organizing a rally that would bring thousands of teachers to Sacramento to attend the rally. Teachers rode in busses, caravans, trains and planes to the Capitol. John Hein, the CTA director of Governmental Relations, directed the lobbying of the legislature. Hein is one of the best political minds in California and he did an incredible job. Two people that were vital to our effort were Bob Hertzberg, the Speaker of the California State Assembly and John Burton, President Pro Tem of the California State Senate. Hertzberg, a Democrat, is conservative, but a nice guy with a social conscience and we were confidant he would deliver the votes in the Assembly. We were patricianly right in our assessment and in January Hertzberg announced that he favored adding a billion dollars to the guaranteed funding for education. John Burton leader of the Senate was very supportive. John has a concern for his fellow human beings that is unmatched by any politician I have ever known. He was very liberal and profane in a funny way. I had great admiration for him then and have more for him today. Burton and Hein did the majority of the Sacramento negotiations. I did the public negotiations with the governor in my speeches and interviews with the media.

As spring progressed, the public negotiations continued. CTA maintained our two billion dollar demand and the governor kept raising his offer. I am sure he was reading the polls and hating every increase he felt he had to make. Davis did not like holding a losing hand, but he was not about to make a political blunder. In late spring his offer reached one billion dollars, but I kept saying no. A lot of people in CTA thought I was crazy for turning down so much money. I wanted that two billion dollars for public schools. The state had been short changing kids and teachers for years and now was the time to do something positive for public education.

Few of us realized it at the time but a perfect storm was forming for our battle to increase school funding. The money was there and everyone knew the schools needed it. The teachers realized this was not just a CTA propaganda campaign but was attainable. The CTA staff was doing an amazing job of organizing thousands of very supportive teachers to go to Sacramento and fight for increased school funding.
Once the May 8th rally was announced the negotiations really heated up. The negotiations were going on behind closed doors in Sacramento with the legislature while the governor and I negotiated in the media. This debate was great material for the editorial writers for California’s news papers. Most of the papers came out against CTA’s quote “money grab”. CTA had started a petition drive to qualify an initiative that would require California to fund its public schools at the national average. At that time California ranked 40th out of the 50 states in per pupil funding. CTA would secure enough signatures to qualify the initiative for the California ballot. That proposed initiative was so unpopular with Democratic legislators that they would rather give schools a large funding increase than have it on the ballot.
Through February and March, we continued to negotiate with the governor. Our position was always the same more money and the funding must be on going with no restrictions on spending. No restrictions meant the state or local districts could not designate the money for programs only and not teacher salaries.
The May 8th rally was going to be a major show of strength. May was the month that the state budget was revised and most budget items are finalized. On May the 7th as my wife and I drove to Sacramento from Los Angeles, the governor and I talked on the phone three times. The first call was general conservation. The second call, he offered 1.2 billion dollars above the 40% of the state budget guaranteed to education. He demanded that we not submit our initiative and to call off the rally. I told him that we could not do that. On the third call, he increased his offer to $1.5 billion if we would rethink the initiative and turn the rally into an anti voucher event. Again I told him that we could not do that.

The May 8th rally was a huge success. It was an incredible experience where 10,000 teachers and students showed up on the west lawn of the capitol. It was the largest rally in Sacramento since the Vietnam War and it sent shock waves through the Capitol.
At the rally, Speaker Hertzberg sent me a note asking if I would meet with him and the Governor that evening. At 7 PM, John Hein and I met with Governor Davis, Sue Burr (the Governor’s education advisor), Lynn Schenk (the governor’s Chief of Staff), Rick Simpson (Hertzberg’s policy director) and Tim Gage from the department of Finance in the governor’s office. The governor offered $1.7 billion and again asked that we withdraw our initiative proposal. We asked what guarantees would we have on his proposal and he said, “Their word.” I did not take anyone’s word. I had negotiated for six years with the Los Angeles USD and if it was not in writing it was not a deal!
The CTA Board of directors met that night we only had one more day before the deadline to submit the signatures for the initiative. The officers and board agreed we had to have a guarantee in writing or the next day we were going to submit the initiative qualifying signatures. Lynn Schenk, the governor’s chief of staff, called me that evening and asked us to delay submission for 24 hours, and then she asked, “What do you want?” At that point I knew that we were close to the $2 billion deal that we had been fighting for. We told her we would hold the initiative signatures until the next afternoon but we wanted a written guarantee, not a verbal promise. Later that evening, Senator Burton called and asked if he could meet with me and Hertzberg the next morning. At that meeting, Hertzberg and Burton offered $1.84 billion and made it clear that was as high as they would go. If I agreed the Department of Finance would write a letter that guaranteed the money would be added to the budget, I agreed. That afternoon, Davis, Burton, and Hertzberg held a press conference to announce the deal. I was not invited to participate in the announcement of the deal.

The $1.84 billion was the largest increase in school funding in California history, a deal that gave schools 18 times more money for the 2000-01 than we had received in 1999-2000 school year. The money was ongoing and unrestricted which means extra money for schools in the years to come. That afternoon we pulled our initiative and Davis and the Democrats were very relieved. In my opinion, this was the first time in my memory that California public schools had received funding that was any where near adequate to meet the needs of its millions of students. The next year many teachers reported to me that they had received a 10% pay raise for the first time in their careers.

Wayne Johnson
President of the California Teacher’s Association
1999-2003

Musings of an old Liberal retired teacher

Musings of an old liberal retired teacher

I feel that I should make my position clear so as not to be misunderstood. I am a capitalist! I have done well as a practicing capitalist. I feel that well regulated capitalism produces the strongest economies and the highest standard of living for its citizens.

Capitalism must be strongly regulated by the federal government. We must never follow the teachings of the likes of Milton Friedman and his advocates, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Bush, junior and senior. Friedman advocated privatize everything run by the government, deregulate everything, and bust all the unions.

There must be a strong democratic central government to serve the needs of the people.
The government must provide essential services for its citizens. Services like police, fire, and quality education.

Essential services must never be sold or outsourced to for profit corporations! If a service is sold or outsourced to a for profit company, the service will always be about the profit and not the service. The for profit service corporation will always be about maximizing profits and never the service.

The future of the U.S. Economy can not be left to the greedy unregulated Wall Street gangsters. This is exactly what Alan Greenspan, Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and others did!

Bill Clinton stabbed hard working Americans in the back while “feeling our pain”!

Ross Perot would have made a terrible president but he was sure correct about NAFTA.

If total private ownership with no government regulated capitalism is so good how do you explain Enron, Goldman Sachs, British Petroleum, etc.?

If government is so bad and unregulated capitalism is so good, why do we have multi-trillion bailouts for multi-billion dollar corporations with minimum wage workers tax dollars?

Obama's Misguided Education Secretary

Arne Duncan, President Obama’s Secretary of Education has never worked in a public school! He has never been a teacher or a principal in any school. It appears the only private sector job he has ever had was to play basketball in Australia and for nine years worked as an investment broker in Chicago. He relates in “old jock” style like a “pick up” game in baskertball. I guess “life is like a box of chocolates” doesn’t work for him.

His approach to changing education is far more economic than educational. He is a free market privateer and part time “union buster”. He wants to turn all low performing schools into charter schools. Charter schools are little more than unregulated private schools run with your tax dollars. Charter schools are ripe for abuse and academically do no better on average than their neighborhood public schools. Voucher and charter schools are very popular with political right wing. Newt Gingrich loves Duncan’s educational policies. John Kline, Republican from Minnesota says of the Duncan agenda, “In many ways it’s a Republican agenda”.

Duncan has a very unique background. His father was a professor at the University of Chicago. He grew up near the university in an intellectually segregated university housing district. He attended the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School. His home had no television. His father read the classics to the family every evening while the children sat around, did their homework and listened. He had an athletic mother who was very involved in her children’s lives.

As wonderful as his childhood sounds it was about 180 degrees from mine and about 99.9% of America’s public school children, especially the minority children in low performing schools. That wonderful childhood, his elite private school and Harvard education may make him totally ignorant of the needs of America’s 45 million public school children.

Mr. Duncan is a man of little distinction and a man of many powerful connections. Working as an investment counselor he was picked by the Superintendent of Chicago’s Public Schools to be a high ranking administrator. His qualifications for this job were ZERO. Two years later he was appointed Superintendent of the third largest school district in the United States by Mayor Richard Daley. All of Duncan’s dramatic school closings and enthusiasm for opening charters had resulted in no gains”, so says Diane Ravitch, Professor ay New York University.

Steven Rivkin an economist at Amherst University worries, “Duncan may be pushing too hard for policies that haven’t been proved effective”. Mr. Dunkin’s Education agenda seems to be to close schools that serve our poverty level children and turn them into charter schools. These schools that serve our poorest children have traditionally had the lowest test scores and the highest drop out rates. There is not one scintilla of evidence that turning these schools into charters is anymore effective than the traditional school that charters replace. It is obvious to me that Diane Ravitch was right, he is a “union basher”. He wants to kill the unions, most free marketers are strongly anti union and I am afraid Mr. Duncan is no different. I suspect his anti union position comes from the fact that unions are opposed to his educational “reforms”. In his rush to implement “reforms” that have no evidence of working, some union leaders have had the guts to stand up and question what he is doing! From his right wing view point unions are standing in the way of “progress’ and “reform” and should be eliminated or dramatically weakened.

After all who should you trust? A teachers union whose policies are developed by union teachers with thousand of years of teaching experience or a guy who never attended or worked in a public school and thinks everything can be related to a “pick up” basketball game.

Duncan is incredibly unqualified to hold the position of Secretary of Education. He should go back to investing with other people’s money, playing lots of basketball and leave educational reform to those that know what they are talking about, classroom teachers.

If you want to know what’s wrong with public education ask a teacher. They will tell you what’s wrong and how to fix it. The problem is that no one ever asks. Obama has appointed a clueless inexperienced well meaning politico like Duncan to fix our schools when he doesn’t have a clue and a track record to prove it.

WHY DON’T THEY LISTEN?

In December of 2009 the National Center for Child Poverty reported that fourteen million children in America lived in poverty. Fourteen million constitute nineteen percent of all American children. What constitutes poverty? The U.S. government defines poverty as a family of four living on $22,050.00 or less per year. Low income is defined as $44,000.00 for a family of four, 41% of American children live in low income families. 83% of children, whose parents have less than a high school education, live in poverty.

A higher percentage of minority children live in poverty and low income families than do white children. 60% of African-American children, 60% of Latino children, 57% of American Indian children live in low income families. Eleven million white children live in low income families.

The N.C.F.C.P. concluded, “Low income families impede a child’s cognitive development and their ability to learn”. Children of low income families “Often have behavioral, social, and emotional problems”.

This leads one to speculate why President Obama wants to evaluate teachers on the basis of standardized test scores. We know that low income and poverty level children are concentrated in “poverty schools” all over the United States. Evaluating teachers in these poverty schools is absurd!

The following is an article that Harriet Perl and I wrote on the subject of test scores and poverty in November 2002. Standardized testing has spun out of control. Large numbers of children are not prepared to take these tests due to their poverty stricken backgrounds and limited English language skills.

“Poor children are much more likely (than middle class children) to suffer developmental delay or damage”, says Ruby Payne in her book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty. Policy Analysis for California Education agrees. In 1999 it reported, “Poor children are two or three years behind their more affluent peers on several measures long before their first year of school”. In 2000, poverty was defined by Julian Palmer at Columbia University as a family of four earning $17,524.00 a year, ($22,050.00 in 2009).

According to 1998 figures from Columbia, the United States leads the industrialized world in child poverty. Twenty-five percent of children under 18 and 33% of Latino children live in poverty, and EdSource reports that 42% of California’s 6.4 million students are Latino. “Well-off white kids continue to outperform their disadvantaged or minority peers, often by a sizable margin”, says a January 2002 article in U.S. News and World Report.

California’s Star program test scores reveal this sad reality and little else. Scores reflect almost perfectly the socioeconomic status of the children who are tested. Despite this knowledge, teachers are being pushed to their limit to raise test scores. It has become the political and administrative mantra in California: Teachers, raise those test scores! We are given no assistance to help the 40 to 45 percent of our children whose families are low income or are living below the poverty line. In California last year, we tested 4.5 million kids in grades 2 through 11. Their test results were published in every newspaper in the state. The state then used the Academic Performance Index (API) to rank every school from the bottom 10 percent to the top 10 percent. Guess who was at the top and who was at the bottom. Two years ago, CTA had the API scores analyzed. We were shocked to find that in the bottom 10 percent of the API schools, 86% of the students were poor while in the top 10% of schools, only 7% came from impoverished backgrounds. In the bottom 10% of schools, 46% of the students were English language learners whereas in the top 10%, only 2.6% had to over come language difficulties. In April 2001, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that 60% of American’s fourth-graders from poverty families read “below basic” on its fourth grade reading test. Simply put, they can’t read. Again, there’s no special help for an identified group of children who aren’t making it despite the best efforts of their underfunded schools and over worked teachers. Now let’s take a look at the reality of testing and what it is doing to our schools. The SAT-9 test, the major component of the STAR test, is a norm-referenced test. That means no matter how the 4.5 million kids score, there will be a top 50% and the bottom 50%. Half the kids and half the teachers lose no matter what! Absurdly, this test is not aligned with some of the more than 400 academic standards. Experts on testing tell me that setting 30 academic standards would be good, but 400 is a joke. One referred to them as California’s “wish list” of academic standards. The test is not aligned to what we do in the classroom. That’s bad enough, but then we make 25% of the kids take a test in a language they don’t understand, English, and people are appalled that these kids score poorly. We make another 10% of students—those with learning disabilities—take the test with no accommodations. That’s 35% of the kids taking the test who are virtually assured they will not do well. Guess who is going to be in the bottom 50% of test scores. A series of news articles by Sarah Tully Tapia, Keith Sharon and Ronald Campbell in the Orange County Register, citing research by Richard Hill, David Rogosa and others, reported that API scores have a 20 point margin of error. Despite this, schools have been put of the list of underperforming schools on the basis of one point. You certainly would’t trust an opinion poll with a margin of error of 20 points. Why would you drive an entire educational system on the basis of a test with such a huge margin of error? The reporters also wrote “Students who traditionally score lower, African American and special education students, are excluded (from the API results at their school) at a higher rate than white and Asian students”. James Fleming, superintendent of Capistrano Unified School district, excluded 1259 of the districts 3,201 special education students from his district’s API scores. One year a school in San Bernardino county raised its test scores by 102 points and won bonus awards. The next year its scores dropped by 105 points. This is not uncommon. As the Public Policy Institute of California revealed in 2000, “Much of the variation in (STAR) test scores among urban, suburban, and rural schools that appear in raw data can be accounted for by the variation in students’ socioeconomic status and school resources”. One of the major problems in California and the U.S. is that the perception of the public schools is based on these tests. A strong case can be made that these STAR Test results are totally invalid, yet they are driving public education in California. Despite the fact that 50% of all students will always score in the bottom half of test takers, teachers are then threatened with repercussions if they don’t raise the test scores when it is virtually impossible to do so. In the testing system, the rule is if someone goes up, someone must go down. We already know who will be at the bottom. We must stop holding teachers accountable for these bogus test results. We must stop demanding that teachers raise scores on these unreliable tests. We must stop rating teachers on the students test scores when we know in advance what the test scores will be no matter who the teachers are!